


And Everywhere I Turn, There’s Fear

by m_class



Category: Short Treks, Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Anxiety Disorder, Canon Compliant, Child Neglect, Food, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, I think Sarek and Amanda were terrible parents to her and it shows, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Introspection, Michael has some things to work through, Michael having Human neurobiology and being raised Vulcan, Mirror Universe, Narrative Flashbacks, Physical Therapy, Psychological Trauma, Season/Series 01, Short Trek: The Girl Who Made The Stars, Vignette, also, and, and that’s my thing to never shut up about, authoritarianism, but very mild characterization spoilers about Michael’s family from S2 and the, is the sci-fi equivalent to neurodivergent kids being raised to act neurotypical, m_class’s 2018-2019 completed-WIP collection, mostly written before S2, narrator who is reliable about facts only, not-quite-unreliable narrator, sort of both
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:15:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23498122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/m_class/pseuds/m_class
Summary: Drenched in the eerie starlight that falls on the ISS Shenzhou, Michael Burnham reflects on her own past experiences with fear, and on the memories of love and warmth that she has carried with her into this cold universe.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 12





	And Everywhere I Turn, There’s Fear

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote most of this story back in January 2019, then put it by the wayside to write Season 2-related fic. As I’ve been complaining about on Tumblr for a good half a year now, I have a handful of pre-S2 and S2-related fics of varying lengths from 2019 and prior complete or almost complete, and I’ve been wanting to find time to finish and post them since this past summer, but being busy and being a slow writer/editor has been getting in my way. Starting with this one, I’m hoping to finally publish them over the next few months whenever I have time.
> 
> This story feels a little too relevant to current events right now. Thinking of all of y’all during this scary time—take care, everybody <3

Michael Burnham stands at the ornate viewport of the other Michael Burnham’s captain’s quarters on the ISS Shenzhou, gazing out at the molten light of a cold universe. Stars glimmer against the velvet darkness of space, the ship’s warp drive hums softly beneath her feet, and the sword at the belt of her Terran uniform rests against her hip with almost the same reassuring solidity as a tricorder would. All of it is almost as it would be on one of the Starfleet ships of home.

Almost.

Michael thinks of how she tried, earlier, to describe this universe. _My eyes open, but it's like waking from the worst nightmare I could imagine. Even the light is different._ _The cosmos has lost its brilliance, and everywhere I turn, there's fear._

In everyone she encounters here, she sees the same frozen terror; the fear and bitterness and pain of people who are never, ever safe. And it reminds her…

Well. It reminds her of many things. Places she has seen on away missions throughout her eight years in Starfleet; beaming down from the Shenzhou, whether openly or covertly, into societies not unlike that of the Terrans. Harsh worlds, where leaders’ word was law, but a law that was ever-shifting, ever-changing, subject only to the whims of power and justified only by the might of a fist.

And it reminds her of societies separated from her own not by space but by time, conjured up by history holos. Cold times in the pasts of Vulcan and Earth, when too many people taught themselves to stare straight ahead as those around them were destroyed by violence and deprivation and unspeakable violation.

But it reminds her, too, of her own fear; the fears of her younger self. It has been nearly two decades since Michael last lived her days in fear, but she can still remember the taste of it on her tongue.

Cold. Acidic. Constant.

She did not put into words, for a very long time, the degree to which fear permeated her earliest years on Vulcan. How it became normal to wake up and instantly feel a cold pit of dread settle in her stomach when she remembered that it was a learning center day. How the city was full of strangers and the woods were full of monsters and the house was full of silence. How tightly her fingertips pressed into her upper arms as she curled in on herself on her bunk on the USS Shenzhou, wondering, heretically, whether it had really been necessary to mold a child to walk the path of those whose neurobiology was entirely different from her own—

Michael shakes her head, brushing the cold surface of the viewport with her fingertips as she pulls herself back to the present. _I was fortunate. I was a fortunate child._

She knows that she was fortunate. That her foster family loved her. That they kept her safe—except for those few times—and clothed—even if she missed the clothes of home—and fed—even if they discovered when she was thirteen that the staple grains of Vulcan were what her Vulcan pediatrician called _suboptimal for Human development_ —

She knows that her foster family loved her, and that she was luckier than many children around the galaxy, to be fed and clothed and receive an education. To grow up in a beautiful home filled with sunlight, and to receive the education that would enable her to explore the galaxy. She knows that she was lucky, even if that luck was threaded through with frozen fear.

But that is what she remembers, now, as she stands in the golden starlight of a universe filled with fear: The dark, echoing space of the Vulcan Learning Center, as she tried to be what she was not; to not mourn her family, not think like a Human; not feel like a Human; not think not feel not be. The glowing lights of the Learning Computer computer as she focused on the task in front of her and only on the task in front of her, pushing away the awareness of her surroundings in a world that seemed to envelope her with emptiness.

Blinking herself back to the present again, Michael lays her palm against viewport’s surface, staring out at the eerie glow of the surrounding stars.

She can look around her in this universe, and she can look back through her own memories, and everywhere she looks, there’s fear.

But—

Michael pulls her hand back from the glass, curling her chilled fingertips in to the warmth of her palm.

But she is not of this place.

Nor is she only of that place, those memories, anymore.

She lived a life before those memories, and she has lived a life after them. She lived a life before being transported into this universe, and she will live a life after it. She has lived a life before and after and during and despite the silences in her childhood and the coldness of this place, and that life has warmed her.

She remembers what she told Sylvia as Sylvia first styled herself into the garb of this terrifying new universe. _You have the strength of an entire crew that believes in you. Fortify yourself with our faith in you. That's what a real captain does._

Closing her eyes, Michael thinks of the people who have helped make some of her fear bleed away; who have cared about her, and loved her, and embodied what it meant to hold on to warmth and laughter and community in the face of pain and danger and fear.

Keyla, in the old days on the Shenzhou when she and Michael were still close, her face the first thing Michael saw leaning over her after a fall on an away mission, smiling and telling her, with a wink, that yes, that cute new ops officer had seen her fall, but don’t worry, Michael had _totally_ hit the dirt in the most graceful way ever.

Ash, surviving months of horrors and somehow still managing to bring warmth and care to the people around him; accepting Michael as she was and now staying by her side in this universe that feels as though it is trying to leech away everything warm and hopeful inside her.

Dr. Nambue, practical and professional, asking Michael whether the post-injury physical therapy exercises that he had assigned her hurt and, to her complete befuddlement, modifying them when she replied in the affirmative.

Sylvia, serving on a starship for the first time in the middle of a war, yet taking the time to get to know Michael and the other people around them; thinking of herself as more than a cadet or a soldier, and embracing the fullness of life and her hopes and her dreams amidst all the terror all around them.

Michael opens her eyes as tears seep through her eyelashes.

Philippa, at the mission briefing before she had walked alone into a dangerous diplomatic mission, Nambue scattering microsensors into her hair as she confided in them that this mission hit all too close to memories of her own past. _How will you endure this, Captain?_ Saru had asked. Philippa had looked at him, then at Michael and Nambue in turn, her gaze steady and warm. _I will fortify myself with your faith in me._

Danby Connor, on the last away mission he and Michael were ever assigned to together, sitting beside her as they waited to rendezvous with the rest of their team in the middle of a cold, muddy bog for two hours. They’d passed the time by talking—about their plans for the week; their goals for the year; why they’d joined Starfleet in the first place. _We’re explorers,_ Danby had said, a trace of wonder in his smile as he gazed out into the misty distance of what, to many people, would have been an entirely unremarkable landscape. _Out here to discover this weird, beautiful universe._

Michael’s father, jogging into her room when she called out at night, telling her the legend of the girl who put the stars in the sky. Her mother, gathering Michael onto her lap in the old armchair to read books about nebulas and black holes, making even nothingness lose some of its fear as Michael snuggled against her shoulder, listening to her translate centuries worth of scientists’ discoveries into language that Michael could understand, her eight-year-old mind filling with wonder.

Why is it, Michael wonders, staring out the viewport, that she can think of the lost ones with somewhat less pain, remembering moments like these, now?

Maybe, she reflects, it is because in this moment, they feel less distant, the warmth of their presence and their lives and their selves as extant as it ever was.

Michael knows, with a certainty deep in her soul, that they would have wanted their warmth to be here; would, without question, have wanted their words and their laughter and their hope to travel alongside the Discovery into this universe and impinge upon its cold and terrifying silence.

And so she closes her eyes, using her memories to pull their presence through time and space as though blowing on embers.

Philippa. Danby. Her lost crewmates from the Shenzhou. Her parents. The warmth and the love and the lives of the lost are here, and the living people she loves are here; Ash and Sylvia and Keyla here, with her, in this universe.

They are all here, steady and warm and true, as real as the fear around her.

Michael remembers her mother’s words after she read eight-year-old Michael a book about what it meant to have an anxiety disorder. _Fear is just one feeling, just one emotional response. Sometimes it warns you of real danger, and sometimes it bubbles up inside you in a way that hurts instead of helps. And I know it does hurt, baby girl. But you don’t have to be alone with that hurt anymore._

Michael rubs her hands together, gazing out into the uncanny glimmer of the stars. The chill of the viewport has faded from her skin, and absentmindedly, she brushes a finger against her pinkie, thinking of all the times she linked it with her mother’s, making pinkie promises.

_You don’t have to be alone with that hurt anymore._

Turning and crossing the room, Michael lets memories of care and hope and love warm her as she steps through the door of the other Michael’s captain’s quarters and out into the cold of a universe suffused with fear.


End file.
